It might not officially be Winter yet, but it feels like it now and The power in town has been flickering all day (I would assume the same is happening at the farm.) About 20 minutes ago, the lights went out, came on again, then went out again at the same time as a loud WHOMP!! noise from outside. Freezing drizzle and ice-fog have been an issue ( Read more... )

Looking out the window, I see that we have the first frost this morning. While it was cold enough to snow (just a smattering that melted right away, unlike Calgary's storm) there hasn't been an actual frost yet. The weather is supposed to start warming up again, so I'm hoping this is just a blip.

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It's been bitterly cold the last few days, and while there is warmer weather coming, the next couple days are still nasty. I forgot to plug the Ranger in, and this morning even though it's been plugged in for a couple hours, it still won't start. I hooked up the battery charger, and it started taking a heavy charge so the battery has taken a ( Read more... )

     The light-bulb idea didn't work at all, things were just as frozen in the morning as they were when we started.  When we went to town, I stopped at Jack's shop to see if he had any suggestions as to solving this problem.  He said that what he had done in the past was to put a small heater inside a shop-vac, and then run the hose from the vac's ( Read more... )

     I spent the morning still trying to thaw out those blasted pipes, with no success.  We had to go to Swift Current to get supplies for the bowling alley and cat-food, so I tried setting up some heaters in the well-pit with the hopes that they'd raise the temperature enough to thaw things out.  That didn't work out...  We got home around 8pm to ( Read more... )

     Still nothing ( Read more... )

     By 4pm, the pipes still hadn't thawed, so there was nothing left to do but head into town to buy a new heat-tape.  I was sure that I had purchased two of them last year, but I can't find the spare anywhere.  Maybe I'm mistaken, or maybe I'll find it again as soon as I no longer really need it.  In either case, I was fortunate enough that this ( Read more... )

     Still nothing - the heat tape shut down again, and the pipes remain frozen.  The problem is that the section where the thermostat is, is thawed out, but the rest of the pipes are frozen solid.  We've tried putting a large parabolic-dish heater down there to try to help thaw out the pipes.  Once they're clear again, the heat-tape should be able ( Read more... )

     Trixstir and I headed down into the well-pit to see what we could make of the issue with the heat-tape.  I had prepared a new cord-end for it ahead of time, and with Murphey running at full strength, managed to put a nice deep slice about 3/4" long down the tip of my index-finger on the copper wire.  Of course, having a big bandage on the tip ( Read more... )

     What was I saying the last time about things finally going right?  Can't have much of that now, can we?

It's 6:14am as I write this, which is a bad enough time to be awake on a Saturday morning, but I've been awake for about half an hour now.  Getting up at 5:45am on a Saturday is even worse, but the worst of it is that I didn't get to ( Read more... )